Shermarama

Thursday night
We went straight from the wristband-getting place to Digital, ex the Zap, to see:
Eugene McGuinness - singer-songwriter who reminded me of John Lennon. If I were in charge of issuing licences for singer-songwriters, 99.9% of them would be never be heard from again, but this bloke could sing well and write songs with interesting changes and a strong sense of rhythm. He's part of the 0.1% that make it worth not running out of the room the second someone walks in with an acoustic guitar.

Broken Records - a large bunch of lads from Edinburgh with all your usual indie-rock equipment plus a string section, accordion and fiddle. Most of the set was melancholy dronings with only one idea, if quite a good one, stretched between several songs - but for about three songs at the end they picked up the pace to something more manic. All right, but nothing special.

Fanfarlo - Bah. I've seen too many bands like this now. The current excuse for getting away with playing strummy weak drifty music with no sense of how to get on top of the rhythm seems to be that it's indie-folk. Yawn.

The Futureheads - I like the Futureheads and I hoped they'd be good and they were better. Energetic and fun, with all the harmonies, a packed and bouncing crowd, which they seemed to genuinely appreciate. Ace.

We tried to go to the GloucesterBarfly after this to see the Ting Tings, but there was no chance of getting in, so we went over the road to the Pressure Point, for an anxious wait while the bouncer ate a bacon butty, and saw:

Arun Gosh - I have no instrinsic trouble with people trying to cross musical genres, but I have a problem with those who do it by chucking a bunch of random instruments together in a way that doesn't gel and expect to get lots of kudos just for trying it. Tablas, DJ, bass and clarinet. Yawn, unfortunately.  

Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee and Guests - And this proves my point - both of these acts involved a dude playing tablas, but only one of them was exciting and interesting. Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee beatboxes and plays the flute, usually at the same time, and this could get old quickly, but he had a crew of guests around him - tabla dude, another beatboxer and a rapper - and they joined in in actually musical ways. The beatboxer was ace, doing ludicrously deep farty bass noises. The highlight of the whole thing was him and the fluteboxer doing the theme to Knightrider. Seriously.

Friday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge:
Gentle Friendly - Two man show with fierce drums and lots of weird samples and keyboard sounds. Violent and unfriendly in the best possible way. Cut regrettably short by technical trouble, though.

We tried to go and see Cage The Elephant at the Escape, but once again, no chance, so we went to the Sallis Benney Theatre, where there seemed to be a whole slew of promising-sounding indie on. Also, the Sallis Benney is part of the University of Brighton, which means that rather than the cripplingly expensive lager or cider on sale at every other venue we went to, there was Guinness for £1.85 a pint. Woo.

We saw:
Dash Delete
The Electric City
Twisted Wheel
The Rifles
but to be honest they were all fairly straighforward young indie bands, with variable quantities of rock or ponce, and they were all okay without being much special, if you ask me.

Saturday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge again:
Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds - There is hope for the future of music. They were young and trying hard but not taking themselves too seriously and taking many of the features of the current idea of indie, the slightly frantic electro beats and the cracked-note vocals, and some of the standing features of punk past, like furiously-strummed scratchy guitars, and doing their own thing with them. Good.

Then to the Arc to see:
The Clik Clik - Boring boring boring herdfollowers.

Damn Shames - A band with a drum machine instead of a drummer, but a well-programmed drum machine, and a style of guitar-based music and shouting that can take having genuinely metronomic drums. Not bad, but I can't see how they've got any scope to get better.

Then to the Brighton Coalition to see:
Viva Machine - who were boring enough that I think I spent their entire set ignoring them

Robots In Disguise - better than I was expecting from hearing the album. It's two girls doing the 'we're girls and we can do punk' thing, though electro-punk at the minute of course, but they managed to make it rise above its basic formula a bit. There was a girl playing the drums but I don't know if she really was, I'm afraid, or just adding some extra thump over the drum machine noises.

The Automatic - also a lot better than I was expecting. Them what do 'what's that coming over the hill, is it a monster' etc., but they had a whole bunch of other songs that also made good use of the same general sound, and they clearly knew what they were about and were pleased with their crowd, which surely means that they shouldn't stay the one-hit wonders people would be forgiven for thinking of them as. It's not entirely the sound for me but I would have no trouble understanding someone who declared themselves a great fan of them.

Now, I'm not certain but I think we went back to the Pressure Point to see:
Times New Viking - Hmm. I think they were exactly what you can see of them on youtube, which is a shouty girl with keyboards and a hair-obscured sweaty drummer and another guitar, and I don't think they're worth the hype in either medium. Meh.

And thus ended three days of indie festival. Three days of indie is enough for me, really. 

....speculation about Dr. Who.


I doubt I'll be particularly satisfied with the ending, however it goes, anyway. And I've arranged to be staffing a beer festival in a field in rural Sussex at the same time as next week's. Still, we're getting free entry and camping, and payment for serving shifts in beer tokens, so it's not all bad...

We went to Wimbledon on Friday. I've watched lots of Wimbledon every year from younger than I can remember, but I'd never been to the thing itself. It was probably the worst day of last week to pick in terms of weather, although it made the most sense in terms of days off.

I had a squint around on the net for an idea of how early we'd have to be there to get a ground pass and there wasn't much in the way of advice; one site for Aussie sports fans recommended getting there by 8, so we did that. The early morning was lovely and sunny, so we sat in the sun in this very civilised and organised queue, read the morning papers, helped the lads next to us with the crossword (Actor, six letters beginning with E, surname Woodward; I mean, what?) and felt quite smug - we were easily early enough, being something like number 3900 in the queue, and hadn't got up violently early to do it. By 10 they had us stood up and doing the final queueing leg, where people kept giving us free foodstuffs including strawberries, and by 10.45 we were through the rather paranoid security search and into the ground.

It turns out to be a dinky little place. I was suprised how small the viewing areas around the non-show courts were, being no more than a single row of benches by some of them. The two main courts are huge, of course, but since we didn't get in those (although we could have done, we were offered tickets for no. 1 court on the turnstiles, but didn't bother) they didn't seem like part of the same place. Although the weather after mid-morning was mostly a bit rubbish, seeing everything knocked down and watching people scurrying for cover when it started raining was kind of all part of the experience, and it only caused about an hour's delay in total. The last match of the day was definitely fighting against bad light, what with the overcast, and one of the players was getting quite shirty about it, but they kept going til it was done at about 9.15.

So we watched two pairs of British players win at mixed doubles, astonishingly, as well as watching some bits of the show matches on the big screen, while drinking nice beer (they let you bring a moderate amount of beer in with you, which is quite unexpected in the modern world of revenue protection) and eating sandwiches, and now when I see bits of the place on telly it's nice to have a feel of what's where. Worth taking a day off for, and next year I think I'll apply for the ticket ballot and see what I can get.

The telly's got absinthecity on it, repeatedly, which is a bit weird. 

Scene: Radio 1, Sunday lunchtime, the Dick & Dom show

Dick (or as it might be, Dom) (talking over the end of that there Sara Bareilles song):  "Catchy. Possibly a one-hit wonder? Sounds like a two year old smacking the keyboard of her mum & dad's piano."

Dom (or as it might be, Dick): "I'm sure she'd like to hear you saying that mate..."

Well, I was rather pleased, actually.

I am seriously fed up of that song that goes 'Ain't gonna write you a love song, cause you asked for it,' etc., because it's been on the radio All The Time, and weirdly without explanation. I've yet to hear a DJ make any comment about the singer, who I've never heard of before, or about the song itself, either positive or negative, for all that it seems incongruously, I dunno, schmaltzy, for Radio 1. It reminds me that much as I've been frustrated by getting American Boy stuck in my head so often, it's got a lot more substance to it than trite ploddy singer-songwriter crud like Love Song. Seriously, I've spent lots of the day trying to dislodge it, inbetween everything else, getting out the big guns like Art Brut and Clutch and QuOTSA and even humming American Boy to myself, but as soon as I stop concentrating, the harmonic guitar line at the end and the Dido-esque chorus lyrics, surely offensive to anyone that's managed to make it past an emotional age of twelve, are back there again.

I see she's due to go on tour with Maroon 5 and Counting Crows next month. And her album's called Little Voice. Good grief. I sincerely hope she fucks right off to Radio 2, or ideally completely off the entire electromagnetic spectrum, as soon as possible.

Things that have happened so far this weekend:

• A large filling has fallen out of a molar
• I've moved almost all my remaining stuff from Mile End to Holloway Road
• I've got a sixty quid parking ticket for being in a bay for about four minutes too long
• I've been to IKEA

All of these things have involved various levels of pain. I've never been to IKEA before, see, and I was quite keen on keeping up the record, but we needed a bed and we had a van and the Friday night before a bank holiday weekend, when they're fully stocked but hardly anyone else is there, was kind of a sensible time to go. Only it led to me having to get up in time to move the van before the residents-only parking bay kicked in at 8.30am on Saturday, which I did, but not quick enough for the tastes of the Civil Enforcement Officer who was standing next to it at 8.32. They're supposed to observe it being in the bay for five minutes, which she in no way did before I got there, but my mistake was in trying to explain that it didn't have a visitor's permit on it because I was about to drive it away. Rather than trying to explain I should have just driven off sharpish before she stuck the ticket to the windscreen, but I had some notion that they could then do me for trying to evade parking ticket justice or something so I was trying to make sure it was all right first. They take pictures to prove you were parked there, and in those I'm plainly in the act of driving away, and since the van hire only cost 41 quid while the ticket will cost sixty, I'm minded to try and challenge it, but it seems unlikely that I'd get anywhere. I think I'll take sixty quid as the price of learning to just drive away.

The moving was quicker than I expected, not least because the van hire place were going to rent me a Ford Connect, a smallish van, but its battery was dead so they offered me an Astra van and I said it was smaller and I didn't want it so they offered me a Transit for the same money. It was ancient and battered, but it ran perfectly well and meant we could move the whole lot in one van load. Jon came down to help and repay some of his housemoving debt, and my cunning skate what I made proved very useful for filing cabinets, if not quite ideal for slightly squidgy boxes. Putting it all away is going gradually but effectively; my fabric stash has actualy been something like organised, there are crannies in the lounge for things like my sewing machine, and having a bed that things can be stored under makes life so much easier. I genuinely don't get why anyone buys a divan bed.

The filling falling out is mainly blithering inconvenient. It doesn't hurt but it fell out on Saturday night, when the next time I can get to a dentist is likely to be next Friday, what with spending three days of next week up at Labman again. Chris told me of the existence of temporary filling stuff that you can get from chemists, though, so I'm sat here trying not to play with the stuff as it sets right now, and contemplating soup for lunch. Hopefully this will get me through the week and then hopefully the university dentists will be able to take me on, because actually it's only half a filling that's fallen out, the top middle bit, in a tooth that's been so extensively rebuilt already that if this filling can't be reconstructed I suspect the whole thing will have to come out. Nyurg.

Umm, and the bed we got from IKEA is rather comfy and was, well, kind of satisfying to put together given that it's me, and I was pleased with the paper tape measures, and the meatballs were quite tasty too. Ain't going there again any time soon, though.

I'M ON THE TRAIN. And doing some work. I'm writing a paper where I find myself saying 'this correlation coefficient is fairly high (0.82) but one of the sets of numbers being correlated is questionable, and so this apparent correlation may be not be valid.' So what I need is a way to say whether these results are so dodgy that making comparisons with them is stupid, or if they're just a bit dodgy and the comparison is therefore interesting, if far from bulletproof.

The dodgy results themselves are the gradients of some lines of best fit. The lines of best fit often have a poor correlation with the results that generate them - more than half of them have coefficients less than 0.7, and two are so poor that the correlations (in a known zero-order reaction, measuring the amount of the breakdown compound being generated against time) are negative. Also, the lines are being calculated from only four or five points of data, (five or six with a forced zero intercept, which should be true) and in one case only three, or four with the intercept. That one has a correlation of 0.95, mind.

I have tried calculating the standard error but with so few results, I think the standard error formula is meaningless. The largest calculated error is about 25%, which looking at the graph it's being generated from is surely bollocks. And this is why I need a statistician, to tell me whether this really is bollocks, or just plausible enough to have to be considered.

My only interest in this is to compare some test methods and show which test methods give bobbins for results, by the way. This one is already going to lose on the basis of taking lots of intervention and high-tech equipment to give you those meagre four or five poorly-correlating results. It's just a question of whether I should dismiss the actual results, too. Anyone got any clues?

Hello everyone, I'm in a hotel in Middlesbrough. It's got a trouser press *and* a mini fridge. And chunky 70s plywood furniture, although the hotel is trying to modernise itself around that and has a restaurant which its website describes as a 'brave new concept'. Which as far as I can tell means it serves quite nice food, actually, which I hope isn't a new concept in restaurants. Either way I'm far too lardy to take advantage of the free use of the gym.

I'm in a hotel in Middlesbrough because of visiting Labman again, to do things with robots. Mainly today we've moved the carousels around and had to rewire them all as a result, but the thing will actually work better now. There was a collection carousel with 15 places, which were meant to act as a buffer for collection, which they'd arranged other things around such that the robot arm could only get to one tube at a time, which totally defeats the buffer idea, so we fixed that.

And I got to Kings Cross for the early early train today by two stops of the Piccadilly Line, because I've left Finsbury Park and the fine Finsbury Superstore and Happening Bagel Bakery behind and moved to a permanent place on Holloway Road, just opposite the strange pointy metal building. We did some exploring of other food sources at the weekend, and the Nag's Head market turns out to contain a proper fishmonger and a proper butcher and a good veg place and a stall that sells Colgate Herbal that Chris has been lamenting the lack of in the UK. Also there will be a general subtle low-grade Morrisons v. Waitrose rivalry going on for some time, I think. Morrisons has scored well so far in crusty granary unsliced bread, brown pasta and decent beer for cheap, while Waitrose has fought back with *not* selling individually shrinkwrapped peppers (grahh) and superior (and cheap) breakfast cereals. Morrisons, however, has seriously let me down by not having any Seabrooks crisps at all, one of the features that had otherwise made me very pleased to see their takeover. I was most miffed, and am considering buying a box by mail order.

I say permanent place and this isn't quite true yet because the agency are being the biggest bunch of unhelpful, unimaginative idiots I've had to deal with in quite some time. They insist that they can't possibly consider us and the other lass in the flat as joint tenants, that we must be sharers, and because of the inherent instability of shared flat groups, we all have to be able to cover the entirety of the rent for the flat with our salary, rather than being considered for our share of the rent. Both me and Chris fall (not very far) short of this, so we both apparently have to have guarantors. They refuse to entertain any explanations, justifications, or modifications to our initial application forms (filled in without any sort of guidance because they're shut most of the time) and they won't answer straight questions. But since we've got the keys from the lass living there and we've moved in already, we may as well do this at whatever glacial speed they want it to happen.

That part of Holloway Road turns out to be a bit pants for buses to work - I pretty much either have to walk back up to where Camden Road crosses Holloway Road, or walk down to H&I, although more research may be needed. Also it takes two tube lines to get to Euston, which is a bit pants. But it'll be really quite easy to walk home, if I feel like it. And even though the flat is on the third floor, it has an apparently reliable lift, so I'm hoping it won't be too tedious to get my bike in and out. Another thing I did this weekend was change a bike tyre for the first time in my life - I've owned my bike for at least 10 years and never once had a puncture; I am such a spawny get in that regard that the front tyre turned out to have a 2cm piece of thick wire stuck *through* a bit of tread such that it stuck out, without puncturing the wall of the tyre or the inner tube in any way. But the bike now has thinner, slicker city-like tyres on, and I've bought a puncture repair kit, which practically guarantees that I'll start getting loads of them now.

I did hear tell that you can make a fried breakfast on a trouser press, using it as a sort of griddle. But I've got no ingredients and I've probably eaten enough lard today already and anyway I think the hotel will do us a fry-up breakfast in the morning. Boo to lack of excuses for trouser press abuse.

I'm reading a book called 'Nanochemistry: A Chemical Approach to Nanomaterials', published by the RSC. It has a picture in it of one of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, from the 1967 World Exposition in Montreal. The picture is credited as being reproduced with permission from "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org". If the RSC think it's all right to cite wikipedia, how can any mere student argue?

Lads, oh lads, oh lads, you've gorn and dropped it. I only bought one album at this year's Roadburn and it was by a band I saw on the first night, Taint, and they were absolutely cracking live and most of the album is likewise but track 7 is frankly dodgy prog, with guitar work that crosses the fine line into widdle and a genuinely inadvisable flute. For an otherwise shouty and angular band doing cunning things with rhythms and odd tonality in a way that's sure to be describable as post-something-or-other, it's a distressing departure. Oi, lads, how about trying post-flute?

 I'm elderly. I didn't mind 27, 28, 29, even 30 could be accomodated with a bit of mental tweaking; 31 was harder and 32 just seems *wrong*. Nontheless, I'm that now, so I'm going to be in the Pembury (see http://www.individualpubs.co.uk for details) from about 7.30-8.00 this evening to mark the fact. Please do come along and join in, if you're minded.

There's a movement that stirs at about this time every year, trying to make St. George's Day into an analogue of the thing we've made St. Patrick's, that is, an evening for going out and drinking beer, only in the case of St. George, real ale instead of Guinness.  I can't see how the causes of it aren't mostly marketing, to get more people in pubs, but whatever the cause, I'm broadly in favour of it. This is because St. George's Day is my birthday, and I'm all in favour of people going to the pub and drinking beer on my birthday.

The question is, which pub should I go and do that in this year, and would you like to join in? My immediate thought is the Pembury. What do you reckon?

Esteemed Brighton protest-punk band Axis Of Arseholes were playing in London on Friday night so we went to see. The first lot on were all about twelve and must have spent a significant proportion of their lives so far on their hairdos. They were called Smoky Carrot, they really really wanted to be the Sex Pistols and some of them probably even have a promising future in bands as they weren't at all bad, if not exactly revelatory. The singer in particular, once he finishes growing and perhaps develops a chin, since he could clearly sing but was diverting it into yell rather nicely. He also had one of the best slogan t-shirts I've seen so far - "I'm in the Bible" which must be some sort of recommendation. The second band were rubbish, I'm afraid, all screwed-up face emo-wank. I've always thought that Batman t-shirts were bad signs in this kind of thing; someone who's clearly interested in buff blokes in rubber and leather but is too repressed to do anything about it. They were called Screaming Green, anyway, and I realise you were unlikely to but in case you might for some reason, don't. Axis of Arseholes themselves were good, though it's a bit odd to see them in a place where there's a few people bopping along and some cheering and clapping at the end of songs but not the all-out scrum you get when they play at the Cowley. The sensible reason why not is because of Brighton and the Cowley club in particular's thing for protesting crusties, although I'd also like to blame the Mother Bar at 333 Old Street, where this gig was, charging £3.80 a pint for a choice of crappy lager or Guinness, while the Cowley does Dark Star ales for £2.20-2.40. At that price we didn't stick around for the headliners. A short walk later and by some miracle, given the location, we managed to find a proper local pub for local people away from the press of Hoxton twattery, that had a pool table and a dartboard and Landlord on tap, and we contented ourselves with simple pastimes til they kicked us out and then I cocked up the night buses home because I hadn't come back to this place by night bus yet. Smashing.

This afternoon I have actually played the drums for the first time in about two months. Someone at work has a band that was formed for the sake of the idea of playing at a friend's gallery show, and at the moment they do covers of obscure shoe-gaze and twee-pop but they're looking to start writing original stuff. They previously had a very rock drummer who claims to have been powered by the Norse Gods and who has done things like turn The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah into some massive fill-laden monster; it's not often that I would take a band's previous recordings and want to do a *less* rock version but this is the case here. I'm not sure what they thought of me and what I thought of them, as a band, but it was certainly good to be playing again. I'd forgotten exactly how much exercise playing the drums constitutes, even for a relatively sedate band like this. I'll hear more from my colleague tomorrow, anyway.

Sorry, but this occurred to me while commenting somewhere else and it amuses me. I was trying to think of things that would reduce the value of my house sufficiently (while not being covered by buildings insurance) to put me in negative equity. Having it drop-kicked into the English Channel by aliens? A giant stone tablet that reads 'I H8 Atheists' falling out of the sky and squashing it? And the thing is, I can't think of any situation where the selling value of the story wouldn't offset the loss.

Seriously though, where do you get proper financial advice? Do you have to pay an independent financial adviser? Or if their pay comes from commission from the products they sell you, don't they object if you don't buy anything? I am going to have to extend the lease on my flat at some point and I'll need a remortgage to afford it; it'd make sense to have someone take an overall look at my financial situation at the same time.

• This house is very twitchy. The power supply blips very slightly every couple of minutes, which produces a blip in the lighting that makes me unsure if maybe I just did a particularly substantial blink. Also, little bits of the house rattle and vibrate. I don't know if it's the tubes, the trains (we are near the East Coast main line, after all) the traffic outside, something infirm in the building itself or some combination of all of them, but every few minutes something will rattle very quickly for half a second, then something else will a second later, and then you feel a lower frequency rumble for a moment, and then there's another micro-quiver in a completely different place - and then it might go quiet for a while again, but I always have the impression that it knows it's only waiting for the next little twitch. It seems happy with its twitchiness, though, it's not uncomfortable, just awake. I quite like it, although the lights are a bit disconcerting.
• Brighton is still a very nice place, especially when seen from the outside of a pint of Dark Star Hophead. The snow was also ace, happening at a much more scenic time of the day than in London. Walking to the pub for a roast through falling snow! Snowmen on the beach!
  
• I made it from Darlington to a pub within shouting distance of Brighton Beach in four and three quarter hours on Friday night. It felt very slightly like the future to be able to do that, and by train.
• Jake and Naz offering us whisky when we got back to the house at about 1am, when I'd had to prop a trollied Chris up all the way home already, seemed like a bad idea but not bad enough to be resisted, which was a *really* bad idea.
  
• I need a new rucksack, a medium sized one. My usual daypack thing is getting rather battered, and while it's surprisingly capacious for putting shapeless things in, and very comfy to wear while cycling and when full of heavy things, I can't put my current laptop in it at all and it's generally useless for anything with a strong shape. Except for its baguette elastic on the side, mind. So if I want to take my laptop anywhere I use this shoulder bag I got for nowt, which is a good shape and size and has many handy pockets but which is actually nasty to carry when it's heavy, i.e. if it's got a laptop in it, and anyway its strap's now broken. It's not often I feel like I should spend money on some specific piece of equipment like this, I should sort it out while I do.
  
• Urgh, sorting things out. There is a big list of things to do with my house in Brighton that need sorting out, like the belt on the washing machine keeping falling off and the boiler being unable, again, to produce hot water. Also I need to talk to the managing agents which makes me wince on principle; they charge me lots of money to send me officious letters about how bikes in the hallway are a breach of the terms of my lease, and to put an advert for themselves by my front door. But you never know, I might be able to get them to do something useful.
  
• Yes, I am talking in bullet points again. I have been writing a presentation which has been put off til next week again because this is my boss, innit. But since the other lab has had the huge machine crate in it emptied, the possibility has once again opened up that I might be able to do some actual academic work. Realising this about four o'clock has made the rest of the day very much more cheerful, even though I'm pseudo-ill again.
  
• I think I'll stop there for now.

Meanwhile, I've moved house. To a new and highly salubrious neighbourhood. Still, nice of the police to come round and clear up the day before I move in. The first meal I've had here was sandwiches made with granary bread from the Happening Bagel Bakery just round the corner, and I have to say, I'm really glad to be living this close to a decent bakery, and particularly one that's open til 11 at night every night of the week.

Almost all of my stuff is still in the basement of the house at Mile End, and when I move out of this place in early May it'll all move again with me. I've brought one box of books and four small CD racks that between them probably represent about a tenth of each of my total stock. About half my clothes, things like almost all the formal stuff, have been left behind, as have two out of the three basses, the desktop computer and the guitar. My stock-cupboard food type stuff takes up an amazing amount of space and I'm not going to use that much more of it here I suppose but I can't quite see what else to do with it, and the handful of things I forgot to bring with me should all have been even more to add to that pile - some pint glasses, some plastic tubs and bowls, washing machine stuff. Anyway, the stereo's up and running, I'm probably two thirds unpacked already, and tomorrow I get to find out how long it takes to get to Euston by bus from here.

Faintly at a loss for what to do, in that odd way you get in an unfamiliar house where you haven't built up habits yet. It's not like there aren't many of the things I used to do in my old house, except talk to my housemates, as well as the rest of the unpacking, and other useful things like scouting out the area and consulting BITE to find the decent pubs. Also there's the usual room owner's stock of books to gawp at, which are 90% about screenwriting, production, editing or some other aspect of film. Also a stack of Disinformation books. This is going to be an interesting diversion, I think.

( My Interests Collage, minus the exclamation mark )

Chris is coming back today. I think he's up in another hour or so, because it's four hours later there, and then heading to the airport. I'm meeting him straight after work tonight, and the first thing I've got to do is take him down the pub and get some proper ale down him after eight months without.

I suspect I'm not going to be able to muster much concentration for the next sixteen hours or so. Mind you, someone on mono just sent me a link to a video for a 60s Bollywood rock'n'roll song and I think that'd be enough to derail several trains of thought.

Tonight I sat down with my esteemed housemate to transfer all the bills over into his name. How long did this take, do you think?
Thames Water
They answered the phone almost immediately, were happy with the idea that the account should transfer to a new person, spoke to braisedbywolves briefly to confirm his name and are sorting this all out. Total time: 3 minutes.

NPower
They supply both our gas and electricity.There was a minor amount of holding, and then I spoke to a cheerful if loud woman who took all the extraneous names off the bill and will put braisedbywolves's on instead, and for both bills. Total time: also about 3 minutes.

BT
They have a fiendish menu system. I negotiated it once, and they said we could do a ten day working transfer of the line. As I passed the phone over the little catch on it that hangs it up got pushed. So I navigated the menu system again, got put on hold, and then got cut off by their end. I rang then back again, navigated the menu system again (I swear it's different every time), got through to someone and explained about the ten day working transfer thing, and got told that this meant we'd have to change phone number. So because the house shouldn't have to change phone number just because I'm moving out, and the only way around this is apparently to close my account and open a new one, this meant a five minute wait while transferring to the accounts (sorry, Customer Options) department. Once on to them I explained the situation and got put on hold for another five minutes while the bloke had a chat to someone about what to do with the apparently unprecedented situation of someone moving out of a shared house. The answer is that our phone line has to be disconnected and reconnected tomorrow, and that there's no way to do this entirely by just shifting data or allocations around. At this point the phone got passed over to braisedbywolves, and there followed some more disconnections, but by this time the BT bloke had a mobile number to keep ringing back so kept doing that til he'd got through every long winded tedious part of the process. But apparently it should all work and braisedbywolves has made sure he has a reference number to call and shout at them with if the phone (and thus the broadband) isn't functional again by tomorrow evening. Total time: about 40 minutes, including three lengthy hold periods, a lot of tedious menu navigating, some hard sell about the various call package options despite the fact we made a total of £1.63 of calls last quarter, and lots of sarcasm about hold messages. But they did make the dogged effort apparently required to get through it all, so I feel I can't completely slag them off.

TV licence
I rang them up, navigated a complicated menu system of the sort that listens to what you say so you can't be sarcastic at it, and then got told that they're only open til 6.30 so they couldn't help me. Total time: 3 minutes but with no actual effect.

Orange Broadband
The companies that sell us methane, electrons and water can change the name of the person who pays for these services by changing something on a database, right there and then while we're on the phone. The company that sells us data access cannot do this. They are going to send us a piece of pulped wood fibre with some ink on it by way of the postal system, which we must then add some more ink to and return to them also by the postal system, or possibly pigeon. Total time: is going to depend on the vagaries of the Whitechapel sorting office. Pffft.

Must also finish and print out a letter to the council tax people while at work tomorrow. Fun fun fun.

The University of London is a civilised place that believes in a six-day holiday for Easter, from Thursday to Tuesday. This cut both ways on Thursday morning, when I had the day free to go house-hunting but couldn't get into the accomodation office of whichever bit of university it is that has that angular metal building doings in Holloway. Now, however, when I've taken the six-week let at Finsbury Park and just have a lot of packing to do, it seems like a splendid idea all round.

I've also taken advantage of the lack of brain-taxedness and availability of shops containing ingredients to have a go at not one but two of the recipes in the Madhur Jaffrey World Vegetarian book in the furtherance of doing 101 Things. (Also, Jon has been down this weekend, and it may be afflicting me idiom, as he'd probably not mind me putting it.) They were Rice With Spinach, which involved basmati and spinach and onion and cinnamon stick, and Tofu In Hot Sauce, which involved tofu and lots of garlic, ginger, chilli and soy. I don't think the rice came out very well but still doesn't seem like something I need to bother trying again, but the tofu was more promising. I think next time I'd use a firmer sort of tofu, or press the tofu first, which I understand is a thing that can be done to upgrade your tofu on the Mohs scale. That basic flavouring seems like a thing worth mastering, though. I'd also have it with noodles rather than rice. I just don't really like rice that much, apart from in densely-flavoured forms like risotto or fried rice or biryani.

The other thing I've done with my day apart from pack and cook is prat about on the internet, as if that needed saying. I usually find photoshop challenges a let-down, because although I'm not much cop at this stuff myself I feel that I benefit myself and the rest of the world by being aware of this and not posting pieces of lame crap in photoshop challenges. An honourable exception is b3ta, where the idea is the main thing and crappy photoshopping is often instrumental, or at least not usually in the way. Here's a challenge with high enough standards not to make me wince, though; putting modern celebs into Renaissance paintings. Some of them are a bit creepy and some have slightly missed the point but some of them are, well. Here's one of Jack Black as Rembrandt that I'd like to hang on on a wall someplace and see how many foreheads crease in confusion as people walk past it. Hee-hee. 

Also, I have been off work ill for most of this week and I'm getting bored of being ill now. This is probably a good sign, mind. I went in yesterday and pottered around with Omron heater controllers and their tiny add-in circuit boards which is always pleasing, but then I wasn't in a fit state again this morning, and this may have been due to talking too much and generally overdoing it yesterday in the cause of trying to find myself a new place to live. The whole idea with finding two rooms in one place looks pretty implausible from the current housing market so I've been trying to concentrate on finding somewhere usable for me, because let's face it, even living in the same hemisphere as Chris would be an improvement right now so somewhere in the same part of London should be entertaining enough to be going on with. And going to Barcelona and the being ill really haven't helped with the search, although I think I've dredged everything plausible from moveflat anyway, but nontheless I've not exactly been stacking up the viewings and thus I felt a bit daft when I went to see a place last night and they asked me if I've been seeing lots of places and if I was going anywhere else tonight and I felt I had to fluff a bit or at any rate not say 'actually this is the only place I've put the arranging effort in to go and see yet because the description sounds so exactly like what I'm looking for, and I'm a relentless optimist' and, well, I shouldn't say any more til I hear if they want me or not - there were a couple of other people had viewed it and they're supposed to be letting me know today and I'm all impatient again.

Also also, today it's struck me again that I'm missing being in a band. Partly the physical process of playing, making music, the physical experience of playing the drums and the like - I found myself pointed at a post on Stephen Fry's blog today about how much he fears and loathes dancing, and I felt quite sorry for the poor lad; I find it very satisfying to be moving around to music, flexing and gyrating and all these other things he records with faint horror, and I find it even more satisfying to be putting in physical effort that makes the music, to be enjoying hitting the beat with your dancing because your dancing *is making* the beat. And partly the interpersonal aspect - you know the thing where rock stars' girlfriends or wives get jealous of the band and start interfering? The only thing that astonishes me about that is that some people might not have got the idea that a band is a relationship, and in many bands quite a close, personal and interestingly-functioning one, all band-slash aside. I'm missing that, I'm missing being someone's straight man, I'm no good at the wild creativity side but I'm missing the people who've done that for me and being the one who gets to try and direct it into something useful. I've answered a few ads with initially promising results that have turned out not to be what I'm looking for again, it seems. Waaa.

Also also also also also, I have been to Barcelona with Jon. Some bits went better than others but all of it was interesting. It was cold and windy, although mostly also sunny, but Catalonia has a lovely landscape, based around sharp hills with unexpected little verdant plateaus, steep-sided valleys covered in pine trees and holm oaks, wide river beds that are mostly empty but which must be fiendish when they flash-flood, and a style of building that hasn't gone out of fashion for a thousand years; it's stone walls and red half-cylinder roof tiles all the way, unless Gaudi's got hold of it, in which case it's exuberantly organic and appealingly literal. I drove on the wrong side of the road and this all worked well enough, although I wouldn't claim to be an expert on how the Barcelonian traffic system works, still. I was particularly flummoxed by the toll gates on the motorway out towards Girona. At the first set of booths we got to I had to pay, and that seemed pretty normal, and then at the second set a few kilometres further on I couldn't work out what to do, and none of the booths were manned to be able to ask. There were no prices up, and nowhere obvious to put money in. There was a woman wandering round with a hi-vis coat and a walkie-talkie and when I found her and sounded bemused at her she looked resigned at me and punched something in the back of one of the machines and handed me a ticket and the gates went up and off I drove, not really any the wiser as to what I was supposed to have done. Was this some sort of special pass for idiots? When we got off the motorway halfway to Girona to go to Jon's half-sister's place (which is ace, and has woodstoves and chickens and guard ducks and a donkey and steep, steep tracks and cool kids and palm trees and just, ace stuff) there were more booths, with people, so I handed over the ticket and they charged me money and that one I could work out. It turns out, for any of you considering driving in that vicinity, that the first set of gates is just a €1.30 tax for leaving Barcelona, and the second set is the start of the tolled motorway, so all they want to do there is give you an entry point ticket, which you then hand in as you leave to show how far you went and therefore how much you need charging, rather like a timed car-park. What caught me out, of course, was the second set of gates being where they were trying to give me something. Toll booths are surely for taking things off you, not giving you them, right? So anyway the car was a dinky little Lancia Ypsilon of the wheel-at-each-corner school and this turned out to be useful for the amount of driving up little twisty lanes and over rough surfaces we did, especially its excellent turning circle when trying to escape from what we'd thought was a petrol place but was actually a car wash back in Barcelona, and it allowed us to visit many small outlying bits of landscape and find medieval buildings in them, which Jon took lots of photos of, although we didn't manage to find a way up to the castle at Gurb, which lurks on a particularly steep hill some way from what the road system signs think Gurb is these days, which is a modern set of housing developments on the outskirts of Vic. We also went to some city centres and saw the medieval buildings which are still being used in them, Girona and Vic and Barcelona, although we mostly failed at finding nightlife anywhere, having to resort to driving to a 24 hour service area on the motorway (getting lost is research, see) to find any take-out beer after 9pm in Vic. And Barcelona has Roman ruins under it, well preserved and presented as the basement floor of the city museum, complete with button labels in the lift that takes you down there of Barcelona for the ground floor and Barcino (the Roman city name) for the basement. Even trudging round allotments in the rain was informative; on the last day we went to Besalu, and there were allotments outside the city walls, and they have a complicated system of covered irrigation channels that trap and distribute rainwater in a way that's been used locally since years had three numbers in and Jon bustled about taking pictures of those too, for use in teaching.

The single most important thing to remember about Barcelona is that it's in Catalonia and Catalonia is Not Spain. The yellow and red multi-striped flags, stickers, graffiti and suchlike will remind you of this any time you're in danger of forgetting. Catalan is a language more directly arrived at from working Latin than Spanish and has a little more in common with French; 'please' is 'si us plau' not 'por favor', so even the basics will give you away. Catalan is very efficient as a language, I'm told, generally leaving out the long endings and frilly structures of Castilian Spanish; even the word for 'one' manages to be uniquely short, being 'u'. My favourite Catalan phrase of the whole trip is 'bikini amb ou ferrat', and as long as you aren't veggie this is an important phrase that will serve you well. A bikini, in Catalonia, is a cheese and ham toastie, not an item of beachwear, and an ou is an egg and ferrat is fried, in practical terms, although given that an ironmonger's is a ferreteria, I suspect it means something more like ironed, but ferrating an ou will join spiegeling an eier as a satisfying way to describe frying an egg anyway. And the one I had in a little caff off the Placa Mayor in Vic was well tasty too.

Good grief, I must be feeling better, or else the aspirin's worn off again and I'm raving.

You've probably heard something by now about basic, non-ad level LJ accounts no longer being available to new users. Here's a comment about it:

"Hi, I'm Jason Shellen, VP of Product Development for LiveJournal. I just wanted to clarify LiveJournal's stance before there is any further misunderstanding about what we are trying to do. An FAQ about the account levels was updated prior to our news post. It states:

"Basic Account is an option available to accounts which were created before March 12, 2008. No account created after this date can be turned into a Basic Account."

Existing users of Basic remain as is.

From a product perspective it was more about creating a new registration process that was easier for new users to understand. I'm sure it's been ages since many of you signed up for an account, but it was quite confusing and included a table of options that was not very inviting to new users.

For new users to the site, the options of either having an ad-supported journal or the option to pay $20 annually for more (2GB) photo storage, more userpics, and ad-controls seems like a much simpler and easy to understand work-flow. We are working hard to add even more features and are currently revisiting our ad-supported strategy to find ways to deliver more user value in a way that isn't crass.

I sincerely hope you will continue to give us a chance to respond to concerns and that we do hear what you have to say about LiveJournal."

This and the various replies to it are fucking funny, frankly. They have Dropped The Ball. It doesn't matter about adverts, really - how many of us use facebook without worrying about them? But they may as well have posted something saying "Hello, we are the new management of LJ and we are The Man." This action and this way of disclosing it gives them a stereotypical spin-drenched corporate face - again it doesn't matter in itself whether they are like that or not, they've just presented themselves as a character that many LJ users are instinctively primed to kick against. Still, never mind, I shall be interested to watch the process of a new system emerging. This is the day LJ tuns middle-aged, folks, it's all decline from here on in. It won't die overnight, but this isn't going to be where the new people go any more.

I went and met my birth mother for lunch today. We stood and looked at the expensive lunches in the British library cafe, and then I suggested going to the pub next door that does two dinners for £6.50 so we did that instead. My birth mother is from Peterborough, via a number of years living in the North, around the Lancashire/ Yorkshire border, and the Northern habits die hard. She was talking about Ashes To Ashes, and remembering back to 1981 when it's set, and thinking of the way Rochdale was then, how vast the cultural gap was between Rochdale and London in that sort of time. I don't remember the North in 1981 very well but I do remember some things. Terraced houses that were chippies, just in the middle of a long row with nothing much other than the queue of people to tell you it was a chippy rather than a house; I've never seen anything like that down south and since the north is now standardising to the south, there are now probably northerners who've never seen one either. 

The worst of the 'past is a different country' effect today was caused by a Chinese colleague remarking that Kings Cross tube had been closed because of a fire. It turns out to be just the report of a possible fire that shut the station for a short while, but I had to point out that the idea of a fire at Kings Cross still has something of a strong effect round here. The post office across the road has a 20 year memorial pull-out thing posted to the wall by the door, and the tube station itself now has a plaque with the names of the 31 people that died in the tube fire in 1987. I'd certainly never been to London at that age, and I do remember the reports on the news at the time but the places didn't mean much to me. But looking up the details on wikipedia just now, it's pretty astonishing reading. 

Smoking on tube trains was banned at the time, but only by a couple of years, after a fire in 1984. It seems it was banned on the platforms and general sub-surface areas, too, but was still allowed in the ticket halls, which means a lot of people lit up on the escalators. The wooden escalators. With matches. Which they then dropped. Onto the wooden escalator, with all the bits of grease and lint and rubbish underneath it. The list of changes to the underground system after the inquiry includes mandatory yearly fire training for staff - what had they done before? - and restrictions on the type of paint that could be used underground; the solvent-based paint on the ceiling of the escalator had caught, and turned the relatively innocuous woodsmoke into horrible black oily poisonous floating death. But mainly, they finally banned smoking on the entire tube system as a result of that fire. The idea that it could take a disaster and a public enquiry for people to notice that portable burning things ought not to be used in a system of windy, hot, underground tunnels full of wooden equipment and the combustible detritus of the travelling public seems a bit far fetched now. And yet I doubt there's anyone reading this who wasn't alive then. Odd.

I'm on my way to another meeting with Labman, the robot-building people, in Middlesbrough. I get on well with Labman, so it could be worse. I would have been able to get up about twenty minutes later if I hadn't left the train tickets in the office last night and all, but then I wouldn't have seen the man from Van Vynck Avian Solutions, strolling down Gower Place with a falcon on his arm at about half six this morning.

Now, Tuesday night. It was another Popaganda and I was being the main Live Music Society stage hand type person, which seemed to mean a certain amount of hefting things about, a certain amount of being reassuring and smiling and acting as if everything was under control, and a certain amount of pegging it out to Maplins to buy extra cables. The band that demanded these was Tired Irie, playing with two big synths and bunch of triggers on the drum kit. And a soundman/manager/control freak who insisted on rearranging the PA while the band skulked on stage like reluctant schoolboys. They were the headliners but they weren't really worth waiting for. I could see Angelo's point about them having a very direct sort of sound, everything straight ahead, but they didn't have any point to make with it, and there wasn't even much to be got out of seeing it live - you could have played a record of them to exactly the same effect. The nearest thing to a saving grace for me was the drummer, who was properly metronomic and casually hard-hitting, in a way that made me think of Prong. Otherwise not really worth bothering. There were rumours of an NME journalist coming to review them, so perhaps I ought to keep an eye out and see whether they think something similar. The crowd didn't mind them, but certainly didn't feel like they'd been won over.

The middle act, Nova Robotics, was much the same in soundcheck as in the gig itself; an affable skinny lad in a large hoodie, playing unearthly guitar along to a laptop backing track. The beats were glitchy, which made Jon reckon that the beat felt lost, which I can follow as a point given that there was only the undifferentiated laptop output providing rhythm as well as almost everything else. The blurb said Boards of Canada mixed with Front 242 and really, no, but it was pleasing enough.

The first band on were a last-minute substitution, called the Fame Throwers. Being around for the soundcheck does give you more insight into the band dynamics; little things like the singer who reckoned his sore throat meant he couldn't possibly go outside in the cold and fetch the bass amp head, so that the drummer had to do it when he should have been setting up for soundcheck. Huh, I thought. But at the same time it's unwise to second-guess how the gig will go from that. They soundchecked for some tedious amount of time and I was ready to be unimpressed but something seemed to switch on for the gig itself. They claim a heavy Pavement influence but if Pavement have ever sounded like that, I ain't heard about it. Jon reckoned he could pick up something of U2 in them but this may mainly tell you that Jon likes early U2 quite a lot. There were two similar but still somehow complementary guitars, a drummer who was simple but effective, who'd be even better if he had the hats under a bit more control, and bassist thrashing at a Thunderbird with a pick. The singer wasn't as good as he thought he was, although i) that may have been due to the cold ii) actually he was still pretty good anyway, especially in the article of being able to pull off singing the sort of thing that would sound like rubbish if it wasn't in a rock 'n' roll context and iii) thinking they're the bees knees is what singers are for, anyway. I dunno. If they'd had any recordings one of us would probably have bought them; Jon went and asked, and got spun a creation myth that I for one don't believe. The verifiable part is that they'd only set up their myspace page the day before, which they have if you look them up, and the unverifiable part is that they've known each other since they were all five but they've only been rehearsing together since Christmas and this was their first gig. Hmmm, say I. The guitarists and bassist know each other too well, work together too easily, and the guitarist who also did synth did lead vocals on one song, in a voice with more impact which I personally preferred to their main singer. I'd guess that those three have been in a band together for a while already, that the drummer got recently replaced and that the singer is a new addition, and so they've relaunched with a new name; most if not all of the songs will have existed already. It's not that any of this is a bad thing, just that I'm naturally suspicious of band creation myths. I've heard the yarns Jodie's spun on this front, not even mentioning any Mississippi Witches.

It's now official - I've mailed the landlord and my housemates - I'm planning on moving out of here by the end of March. I need to be closer to UCL in Euston, and it'll be good to live in some other bit of London instead of staying in the same place for three years. I'm intending to move to page 49, or for those of you who don't have my streetmap, somewhere in N7, NW5 or the bottom of N19, and for those of you who aren't postcode fans, somewhere in the vicinity of Holloway.

Now, for someone who's paid quarterly, this is actually a bit of a stupid time to move. But it just seems like the time to do it. The rent here will go up after March and for the new rate I'll be paying here I'm sure I can get something that'll do the job. So, just on the offchance, do you know of any house places going in the Holloway vicinity, and do you know anyone who might want to move to Mile End?

One - I am currently engaged in designing the most expensive baking tins ever. Platinum wellplates, worth about four grand each; they have a serious scientific purpose but hopefully this will not prevent at least trying using them to make nanomuffins.

Two - On Saturday I called by Textile King on Berwick Street since I was in the vicinity, and they were having an offcut sale. I've got about five metres of grey-green lightweight good quality suit material, roll price about £110, for a fiver. A FIVER. 

Three - Chris is coming back to England at the end of March. Ahahahaha.

Achieved (albeit briefly) a three-way conversation by skype, earlier this evening. With Tom in a web-cafe in Panama City, Chris somewhere in rural Tanzania with a satellite dish and me on home ADSL in London. Can you guess which of these connections seems to cause skype the greatest grief? Yes, that's right, step forward Orange broadband...

We were in Bradford for two nights, for this conference about nanoparticles. Most of the students in my group are either Chinese and don't drink much or are Muslim and don't drink at all, so whiling away the evening in a pub isn't really an option. Handily, though, the hotel was next to a cinema. We went to see Cloverfield, a film I'd heard the odd fragment but nothing substantial about. The short review is, go and see it, and go and see it on a cinema scale while you can too. Some bits of it are scary or gory but it doesn't go out of its way to play that up, that's not what the film's about, and there is a monster but the exact nature of the monster isn't at all important and that's not what it's about either. It's about what people do when confronted with something immediate and life-shattering to deal with and as a film about that, it's really well-done.

I slogged home on the bus on Wednesday night, in the spirit of saving money, and then ate my tea and sat down with the laptop. My to-do list has had 'check out Art Brut tickets' on it for about three weeks, and there was an email from some ticket service or another that mentioned them as touring in February, so I took the opportunity to have a quick squint at the dates. A few moments of open-mouthed double-takes later, I twigged that the doors for the London gig at ULU (five minutes from where I work) were opening in fifteen minutes. Three quarters of an hour and seventeen pounds ninety later I was stood at the side of the venue with a pint of Guinness, feeling quite smug. 

The support band were called Popular Workshop, which abbreviates handily to Pop Shop for t-shirts. They certainly didn't start with a following but I think they won a number of people over. Bassist flailing around in rolled-shirt-sleeves and tie, metronomic drummer and a guitarist who remembers grunge, it was all a bit Fugazi via the Futureheads. Kept me amused, anyway, I grinned through quite a lot of the set, and I'd be happy to see them again somewhere. 

Art Brut were doing two nights in a row at ULU, and the night before they'd had a string section. Tonight it was brass; trumpet, trombone and something that must have been either a baritone or bass saxophone. The brass started out on stage on their own with the 2001 theme tune and as Art Brut came out, managed to make it morph into Direct Hit, which was a great start. Eddie Argos wasn't quite up the standard of all-round proclaimer of wisdom I'd been expecting, but he did keep insisting that having a brass section made them a Big Band. Other claims for the evening included both Emily Kane and his little brother being in the audience, hence not hamming either of those songs up half so much as I've heard is possible. Still, the brass section were generally a bonus, not really being in a position to get in the way of something as simple and direct as an Art Brut song and making their own contribution to the overblown endings that seem to be necessary to the Art Brut experience. It was a fun gig all round, with a good-natured bouncing pit (Eddie managing to crowd surf at one point) and all the songs you wanted to hear (though let's face it, they've only got two short-ish albums to pick from) and lots of shouting about being Top Of The Pops, though at the same time they were never going to blow anyone's musical mind and I can see how seeing them repeatedly would get old. Worth it for the sake of taking advantage of being in London and able to go to large gigs at zero notice, if nothing else.

I've been reading Aldous Huxley's Brave New World this week, and I have to say I'm genuinely disappointed with it. The copy I've got has an introduction by Christopher Hitchens, and after reading that I was a little worried that the book wasn't going to be as good as I was hoping; reading the introduction again now, I think it's actually a fairly gentle, reasonable, affectionate criticism. I'm less inclined to be affectionate, m